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Think of a sound passing through the air and carrying a word;
an ear within range catches and comprehends; and the sound and
word will strike upon any other ear you may imagine within the
intervening void, upon any that attends; from a great distance
many eyes look to the one object and all take it fully; all this,
because eye and ear exist. In the same way, what is apt for soul
will possess itself of soul, while from the one identical
presence another will derive something else.
Now the sound was diffused throughout the air not in sections but
as one sound, entire at every point of that space. So with sight:
if the air carries a shape impressed upon it this is one
undivided whole; for, wherever there be an eye, there the shape
will be grasped; even to such as reject this particular theory of
sight, the facts of vision still stand as an example of
participation determined by an identical unity.
The sound is the clearer illustration: the form conveyed is an
entirety over all the air space, for unless the spoken word were
entire at every point, for every ear to catch the whole alike,
the same effect could not be made upon every listener; the sound,
evidently, is not strung along the air, section to section. Why,
then, need we hesitate to think of soul as a thing not extended
in broken contact, part for part, but omnipresent within the
range of its presence, indwelling in totality at every point
throughout the All?
Entered into such bodies as are apt to it, the soul is like the
spoken sound present in the air, before that entry, like the
speaker about to speak- though even embodied it remains at once
the speaker and the silent.
No doubt these illustrations are imperfect, but they carry a
serviceable similitude: the soul belongs to that other Kind, and
we must not conceive a part of it embodied and a part intact; it
is at once a self-enclosed unity and a principle manifested in
diversity.
Further, any newcoming entity achieving soul receives
mysteriously that same principle which was equally in the
previously ensouled; for it is not in the dispensation that a
given part of soul situate at some given point should enter here
and there; what is thought of as entering was always a
self-enclosed entire and, for all the seeming entry, so remains;
no real entry is conceivable. If, then, the soul never entered
and yet is now seen to be present- present without waiting upon
the participant- clearly it is present, here too, without breach
of its self-inclusion. This can mean only that the participant
came to soul; it lay outside the veritable reality but advanced
towards it and so established itself in the kosmos of life. But
this kosmos of life is a self-gathered entire, not divisible into
constituent masses but prior to mass; in other words, the
participation is of entire in entire. Any newcomer into that
kosmos of life will participate in it entire. Admitting, then,
that this kosmos of life is present entire in the universe, it
must be similarly entire in each several entity; an identity
numerically one, it must be an undivided entire, omnipresent.
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